By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
At first, I was taken aback when I read John L. Allen’s May 23 column about Pope Francis on the website Crux (cruxnow.com). The title of the column was “Let’s face it: Americans just aren’t this Pope’s favorites.” Upon reflection, I would say that Allen is on to something. (In addition to serving as editor of Crux, Allen also writes a column on Catholic issues for The Boston Globe.)
I’ll let Allen speak for himself: “By now, it’s clear that one defining feature both of Francis’ personality and his approach to governance — which shouldn’t be all that surprising when you think about it — is a distinct ambivalence about the United States and Americans. When Francis talks about ‘interests’ and ‘powers’ and ‘forces’ behind global political and economic systems he finds unjust, those often appear to be code words for the United States — and that, for the record, was before Donald Trump became a major party candidate for president.”
If Allen is right, this explains why Francis is so critical of our efforts to control our borders, why he is chummy with Raoul Castro and the Iranian leaders, and why he is so harsh in his evaluation of economic inequality in the United States (and silent about the mess in Venezuela and Cuba created by socialists professing their dedication to economic equality).
Allen points out: “Repeatedly, [Pope Francis has] been forced by reporters to respond to Rush Limbaugh calling him a Marxist. On a flight on the way back to Rome from Paraguay last July, he acknowledged hearing that ‘there were some criticisms from the United States’ about his environmental encyclical, Laudato Si. Ecclesiastically, there’s no more visible icon of resistance to some of reforming elements of the pontiff’s agenda than American Cardinal Raymond Burke.
“It’s probably natural, therefore, that Francis doesn’t always feel warm and fuzzy about the Stars and Stripes.
“That ambivalence shows up, for instance, in the fact that American influence in the Vatican today is at a low ebb, with no major Vatican department currently led by someone from the States.”
If I may add to Allen’s list, this could also explain why we seldom, if ever, hear the Pope raising the possibility that the American people and our free-market system have anything to do with making the United States a country that attracts so many illegal immigrants, rather than the socialist countries he seems to favor; why he does not call the world’s attention to the major role the United States plays in relief missions wherever there is a catastrophic earthquake or tsunami in the Third World, or to the central role the United States plays in financing the United Nations’ humanitarian efforts.
Allen applies Occam’s razor: The simplest explanation is likely to be the best. The Pope doesn’t like us.
Writes Allen, “First of all, Francis is Latin American, and resentment of the U.S. is sort of mother’s milk across the region. Latin Americans grow up learning about the U.S. role in coups in Honduras, Chile, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, and elsewhere, and there’s a pervasive belief that the political and economic deck has been stacked to ensure that wealth flows north and hardship stays in the south.”
Is Allen correct? Could it be that simple? Is the Pope’s animus against the United States rooted in an antipathy for gringos? I submit it is not a preposterous claim. A man’s cultural biases do not evaporate when he becomes Pope, especially when he is not speaking ex cathedra.
It must be stressed that Allen is not some rightwing conspiracy theorist. He once wrote regularly for the National Catholic Reporter, a decidedly liberal publication. He writes calmly and rationally. He is not looking to condemn Francis. Rather, he seeks to explain his attitude toward us, including the following observation:
“Prior to his election Francis had never set foot in the United States, making him the only pope in the last eighty years other than St. John XXIII who had never been to America before taking office — and, of course, it would have been far more difficult for Angelo Roncalli to get here in the 1940s or 50s than Jorge Mario Bergoglio in, say, the 1980s or 90s.”
What Allen is asking us to ponder about Pope Francis is a phenomenon most of us have experienced in our own lives when we travel outside the United States. It is often described as one of the great benefits of travel: We come to realize how different the people of foreign lands are from our simplistic caricatures of them. We discover — to put it in simplistic language — that the average Frenchman does not sit around all day in a beret smoking Gauloises, that you won’t find many Germans yodeling in lederhosen during working hours, that not everyone in Spain is a devotee of bullfighting.
We find out that the people of these countries go about their days pretty much the same way we do: working at their jobs and taking care of their families in a manner that would be of little interest to a film crew from the Travel Channel.
Americans would like to think that tourists discover the same thing about us. We know that we are not like the characters representing us in the movies and the television reality shows. We assume that people who visit the United States will learn that quickly; that they will find the average American has next-to-nothing in common with the Hollywood types and Wall Street social climbers trying to outdo each other in conspicuous consumption at the Hamptons or in Palm Beach; that the Kardashians and the other reality show characters with lives in turmoil are not part of the American mainstream.
We would also like to think that people who have never visited the United States apply some common sense when making judgments about us; that they know the difference between what they see in the movies and real life.
But maybe we are wrong to assume that. Perhaps there are people around the world, including Pope Francis, who actually think most Americans are like the people they see in the movies, or hear discussed in left-wing academic circles, and dislike us for that reason. Allen speculates that Francis’ “massively successful trip to the United States last September” may have changed things. Allen points to “people close to Francis” who say the trip “helped him to better distinguish between ordinary Americans and the ‘system’.”
Let’s hope so. It can’t be good for the United States or the Church for large numbers of Americans to come to the same conclusion about the Pope that John Allen came to. We can’t expect everyone in the United States to work as hard at finding a reasonable explanation for the Pope’s motives as he did. I bet that you have heard the same grumblings among ordinary American Catholics that I have.
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress